text:
- Two decades of Amazon.com recommendations
- Quick links
- All Crunchzilla tutorials now open source
- Quick links
- Book review: Radical Candor
- More quick links
- Quick links
- Book review: Chaos Monkeys
- Quick links
- More quick links
- Quick links
- Code Monster from Crunchzilla is now open source
- Quick links
- Virtual reality hitting the mainstream: The next $100 bet
- Tablets replacing PCs: Resolving the $100 bet
- Quick links
- SwipeLingo and Javascript Notebook
- Working at Microsoft
- Quick links
- Not working at Google
- Working at Google
- Quick links
- Interview on early Amazon personalization and recommendations
- Quick links
- Data Maven from Crunchzilla: A light introduction to statistics
just celebrated its 20th anniversary. On its 20th anniversary, the editorial board created its first ever "The Test of Time" award. Im honored to say they gave it to our 2003 article, "Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering", which continues to be accessed, cited, and used in industry and research many years after its original publication. In addition, for the 20th anniversary issue of IEEE Internet Computing, we wrote a new article, "Two Decades of Recommender Systems at Amazon.com". Some excerpts:
For two decades now, Amazon.com has been building a store for every customer. Each person who comes to Amazon.com sees it differently ... Its as if you walked into a store and the shelves started rearranging themselves, with what you might want moving to the front, and what youre unlikely to be interested in shuffling further away. Amazon.com launched item-based collaborative filtering in 1998, enabling recommendations at a previously unseen scale for millions of customers and a catalog of millions of items. Since we wrote about the algorithm in IEEE Internet Computing in 2003, it has seen widespread use across the Web, including YouTube, Netflix, and many others. The algorithms success has been from its simplicity, scalability, and often surprising and useful recommendations, as well as desirable properties such as updating immediately based on new information about a customer and being able to explain why it recommended something in a way thats easily understandable. What was described in our 2003 IEEE Internet Computing article has faced many challenges and seen much development over the years ... We describe some of the updates, improvements, and adaptations for item-based collaborative filtering, and offer our view on what the future holds for collaborative filtering, recommender systems, and personalization. .... What does the future hold for recommendations? ... Discovery should be like talking with a friend who knows you, knows what you like, works with you at every step, and anticipates your needs. Recommendations and personalization live in the sea of data we all create as we move through the world, including what we find, what we discover, and what we love ... Intelligent computer algorithms leveraging collective human intelligence ... Computers helping people help other people. The field remains wide open. An experience for every customer ... offering surprise and delight ... is a vision none have fully realized. Much opportunity remains to add intelligence and personalization to every part of every system, creating experiences that seem like a friend that knows you, what you like, and what others like, and understands what options are out there for you.
Some of the tech news I found interesting lately, and you might too: * Jeff Bezos: "Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you're wrong? .... If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure." ([1]) * Jeff Bezos: "I would say, a lot of the value that we're getting from machine learning is actually happening beneath the surface. It is things like improved search results. Improved product recommendations for customers. Improved forecasting for inventory management. Literally hundreds of other things beneath the surface." ([1]) * A good summary of Mary Meekers 2017 report. A key highlight is saturation in smartphones and internet usage. ([1]) * New Google AI incubator: "Investment arm aimed squarely on artificial intelligence ... will operate almost like an incubator with a shared workspace for AI startups and mentorship" ([1] [2]) * Lots of good labeled data (reliable ground truth) is the key to success with AI ([1] [2] [3] [4]) * AI in the real world is a lot harder than ideal conditions in part because you see crazy things like robots getting attacked by humans ([1] [2]) * "The Google [Chrome] ad-blocker will block all advertising on sites that have a certain number of unacceptable ads, according to The Wall Street Journal. That includes ads that have pop-ups, auto-playing video, and prestitial count-down ads that delay the display of content." ([1]) * Nice ACM Queue article from Google SREs on availability as a combination of subservice reliability, rapid recovery, and setting expectations ([1]) * "Designing a [software] library to reduce cognitive load is still the exception, not the rule" ([1] [2]) * A lesson for bigger companies, investing in the long-term with your researchers, who are often working a few years ahead of what youll need now ([1]) * Wow: "The Melt's blundering trajectory is instructive ... Entrepreneurs frequently embark on these missions with vast sums of money and a deep belief in technology's power to solve all problems — which is not always a formula for success .... They were all good people, and they all wanted good things. They just didn't know anything about running restaurants." ([1]) * "The once-hot social network was built on the idea that people would enjoy having anonymous conversations with people close by. That's a fantastic concept until you remember that anonymous internet person and by definition near you are scary as hell in practice." ([1]) * Great teardown of the Juicero, includes some excellent business advice on iterative development and testing your ideas on real customers ([1] [2]) * "When the US government discovers a vulnerability ... it can keep it secret and use it offensively ... or it can alert the software vendor and see that the vulnerability is patched, protecting the country ... Every offensive weapon is a (potential) chink in our defense." ([1]) * On spearfishing attacks: "By a careful design and timing of a message, it should be possible to make virtually any person click" ([1] [2]) * Schneier on forging voices: "I dont think were ready for this. We use peoples voices to authenticate them all the time, in all sorts of different ways." ([1]) * Facebook says, "We have had to expand our security focus... to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people" ([1] [2]) * Remarkable and concerning that this is possible: "By accessing accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, the Web-hosted JavaScript measures subtle changes in a phones angle, rotation, movement speed, and similar characteristics. The data, in turn, can reveal sensitive information about the phone and its user ... [including] the keystrokes being entered" ([1]) * Nice high level description here of the difference between what Apple and Google are doing for privacy-preserving machine learning. In brief, Apple adds noise to the data to preserve privacy, but Google learns on the device then sends the updates to the machine learned models back (much like parameters servers in deep learning). The truth is theyre probably both doing both, but its still a good thing to think about. ([1]) * Using battery backup to optimize gas power plants by being able to skip the expensive bits for gas turbines, sitting in standby because of lengthy startup times. Its easy and practical, a nice example of low hanging fruit with major impact. ([1]) * Good data on the projected costs of energy sources ([1]) * Good data on the newspaper industry. Theres a curious spike in ad revenue from 1980-2000 that isnt matched by subscriptions. ([1]) * Jeff Bezos is making journalism profitable: "The Post has said that it was profitable last year — and not through cost-cutting ... The Post has gone on a hiring spree. It has hired hundreds of reporters and editors and has more than tripled its technology staff ... third straight year of double-digit revenue growth ... You have to be great at technology. You have to be great at monetization. But one thing I think we're proving is that if you are, great journalism can be profitable." ([1]) * How Google took over the classroom, great article, but misses that the failure of iPads was a big piece of this ([1] [2]) * Duolingos excellent efforts to help people learn English, which can be a tool for economic or educational advancement ([1]) * Amazon Web Services cuts prices again, remarkable ([1]) * Almost all cloud workloads right now are not cloud optimized, so the customers mostly moved a system built for fixed hardware resources to the cloud and then run idle a lot rather than redesigning to optimize with dynamically scaling ([1]) * Latest version of Google Earth is impressive, definitely worth trying ([1]) * Brent Smith and I received the first ever IEEE Internet Computing Test of Time award for our 2003 paper on Amazons recommender system. In a new article for the IEEE Internet Computing 20th Anniversary Issue, we look back at the last two decades. ([1]) * A virtual reality game that succeeds at taking advantage of what it can do well and what it cant to create a fully immersive experience ([1]) * Somehow, I missed that Chris Sacca is retiring. Amazing career and influence he had, and impressive to decide to go an entire new direction now. ([1]) * In a Stack Overflow survey, what software engineers care about, its who they work with, what they are doing, and what they learn far more than salary. In the top five items, three are about who you work with and what you learn, one is benefits, and one is commute. But the benefits are complicated -- its not salary, stock, and bonus -- but the top items all things related to work environment and commute, vacation, and health care. ([1]) * Great interview with the CEO of Coursera: "Humility and the ability to listen well are the big things I look for ... If you want to understand people, you need to hear them ... [Also have] ambitious goals to lift the organization up and everybody with it. Setting goals that are ambitious but also achievable is an important skill." ([1]) * Great quote from Jeff: "At Amazon, weve had a lot of inventions that we were very excited about, and customers didnt care at all. And believe me, those inventions were not disruptive in any way. The only thing thats disruptive is customer adoption." ([1]) * Nice line in Dan Arielys book Payoff: "If you really want to demotivate people, shredding their work is the way to go, but ... you can get almost all the way there simply by ignoring their efforts." ([1]) * Xkcd points out minor changes in methodology yield radical changes in data visualizations of most unusually popular activity in a location ([1]) * Xkcd on machine learning, disturbingly close to reality ([1]) * Xkcd on hard problems ([1]) * Xkcd on survivorship bias ([1]) * Xkcd on unhelpful code reviews ([1]) * Very funny that Burger King ran an ad with "OK, Google" and it works. Once again Xkcd was hilariously prescient about this. ([1] [2]) * SMBC comic on bayesian inference: "Given his low priors..." ([1]) * SMBC comic: "Then it occurred to me, hey, Ive got like a sample size of one here, and its not double blind." ([1]) * SMBC comic on behavioral economics ([1]) * SMBC comic: "Wait, are you going to turn my lifes work into a joke about butts or something?" [1])
is now available for all the Crunchzilla coding tutorials. Code Monster, Code Maven, and Game Maven from Crunchzilla have been used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to experiment with learning to write computer programs. There have been many requests to make them and available in languages other than English. By open sourcing the Crunchzilla tutorials, I hope three things might happen:
Translations: I hope others are able to take the content and translate part or all of it into languages other than English for use in more classrooms around the world. New lessons: New tutorials might teach programming games, working through puzzles or math problems, or perhaps a more traditional computer science curriculum aligned with a particular lesson plan. Entirely new tutorials: Some of the ideas and techniques -- including the step-by-step learn-by-doing style, live code, informative error messages, and avoiding infinite loops in students code -- might be useful for others.The code was designed to be all static, so you can easily create your own version just by editing the files and then putting all the files together on your own server. There is a single JSON file that contains all the lesson content. If you use the code for anything that helps children learn, Id love to hear about it (please e-mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com).
A carefully picked list of some of the tech news I enjoyed recently: * So, you know that prototype we showed you? Turns out AI in real world conditions is hard. ([1] [2] [3]) * Artificial intelligence expert Yann LeCun says, "There have been, on the face of it, impressive demonstrations, [but] those are not as impressive as they look ... They dont have common sense ... One of the things we really want to do is get machines to acquire the very large number of facts that represent the constraints of the real world just by observing it through video or other channels. That's what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end." ([1]) * Genetic algorithms and neural networks are back. It feels like the 1990s all over again. ([1]) * Bringing more novices to AI now is the way to get more experts and advances later ([1]) * Nice results from focusing on errors that matter to people, the perceived quality of the system by humans, not theoretical accuracy ([1] [2]) * Success often comes from trying many things: "Start ... with a hazy intuition or vision ... After a lot of trial and error they get closer and closer to discovering what their idea is ... Seeking novelty instead of objectives is risky — not every interesting thread will pay off — but ... the potential payoffs are higher." ([1]) * Research includes people able to do things no one else can, including having data or compute at the frontier beyond what anyone else has done before ([1] [2]) * 6.3M virtual reality headsets sold in 2016, but almost all so far just the cheap toys where you slot your smartphone in to use as the screen ([1] [2]) * "Total [tablet] sales sinking 15.6%, year on year, with sales of 174.8M units in 2016 compared to 2015s 207.2M" ([1]) * For the first time, more people in the US using Netflix than a DVR: "54 percent of US adults reporting they have Netflix in their households compared to the 53 percent of US adults that have DVR" ([1]) * The Economist: "Amazon's heady valuation resembles a self-fulfilling prophecy. The company will be able to keep spending, and its spending will keep making it more powerful" ([1]) * "What has surprised AWS as the cloud has evolved ... I don't think in our wildest dreams we ever thought we'd have a six- to seven-year head start" ([1]) * ... and that is true in retail for Amazon as well ([1] [2] [3]) * "Yahoo is perhaps most famous for destroying all of its best social properties. From its hideous deformations of Flickr and neglect of Upcoming to its starvation of Delicious and torment of GeoCities users, the company excelled at buying great things and turning them into unusable parodies of themselves. Execs seemed to profoundly misunderstand why people used the sites they bought." ([1]) * "Google will account for 78 percent of search ad revenue in 2017, while Facebook will get 39 percent of display ad revenue. Everyone else ... is fighting over the scraps." ([1]) * Culture is created by what you publicly reward, not what you say ([1] [2] [3]) * "The problem with bad processes is that they institutionalize inefficiency. They ensure that things will be done the wrong way, over and over and over again" ([1] [2]) * "Burnout begins when a worker feels overwhelmed for a sustained period of time, then apathetic and ultimately numb .... Workers who used to take the lead on projects grow taciturn during meetings. Top performers start coming in late, leaving early and watch their careers stall ... Burnout is claiming victims at work, and companies aren't ready to cope" ([1]) * A lot of companies have merely medium data, not big data: "Hundreds of enterprises were hugely disappointed by their useless 2 to 10TB Hadoop clusters ... Their data works better in other technologies" ([1]) * Lack of incentives leads to poor Internet of Things security ([1]) * As Javascript ages, it repeats many of the problems of the past: "Using data from over 133K websites, we show that 37% of them include at least one library with a known vulnerability" ([1]) * "What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?" ([1] [2]) * Many Xkcd comics are both funny and prescient, and this one on encryption seems particularly relevant right now ([1]) * Xkcd comic on friends that have an Amazon Echo ([1]) * SMBC comic on "existential sort". Dont miss the hovertext: "Also, any list can be immediately sorted by just pretty much being fine with it the way it is." ([1])
Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Its a good read on managing and focused on people. Id recommend it if you are a manager or help others manage people. Id summarize it by saying it takes a teaching and mentoring approach to management, very much of the school that managers primarily exist to help the people on their team. The advice is both practical and actionable, with specific advice for running 1:1s and meetings, and focused how to encourage conversations where people strive to improve themselves as well as helping others. Some carefully selected quotes from the book: "It seems obvious that good bosses must care personally about the people who report directly to them ... And yet ... " "It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to accept and act on your praise and criticism, tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well, engage in this same behavior with one another ... embrace their role on the team, and focus on getting results" "When youre the boss, its awkward to ask your direct reports to tell you frankly what they think of your performance, even more awkward for them than it is for you. To help, I [ask] ... Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me? ... It is essential that you ... commit to sticking with the conversation until you have a genuine response. One technique is to count to six before saying anything else, forcing them to endure the silence. The goal is not to bully but to insist on a candid discussion ... Then listen with the intent to understand ... Once youve asked your question and embraced the discomfort and understood the criticism, you have to follow up by showing that you welcome it. You have to reward the candor if you want to get more of it ... Make a chance as soon as possible ... show youre trying." "If you can absorb the blows, the members of your team are more likely to be good bosses to their employees when they have them ... The rewards of watching people you care about flourish and then help others flourish." "The ultimate goal of Radical Candor is to achieve results collaboratively that you could never achieve individually ... A culture of guidance ... An exemplary team ... self-correcting quality whereby most problems are solved before you are even aware of them ... Dont start by bossing people. Theyll just hate you. Start by listening to them."
Some of the tech news I found interesting lately, and you might too: * "In addition to making our systems more intelligent, we have to make them more intelligible too ... AI systems to augment human capabilities ... A human-centered approach is more important than ever." ([1]) * "Understanding the brain is a fascinating problem but ... separate from the goal of AI which is solving problems ... We don't need to duplicate humans ... We want humans and machines to partner and do something that they cannot do on their own." ([1]) * "Machine learning and reasoning to help doctors to understand patient outcomes -- in advance of poor outcomes ... a great deal of low-hanging fruit where even today's AI technologies are well positioned to help ... error detection, alerting, and decision support ... could save hundreds of thousands of lives per year" ([1] [2]) * "Googles first entirely on-device ML technology ... machine intelligence ... run on your personal phone or smartwatch" ([1]) * Accelerometers and heart rate monitors in earbuds, clever and avoids the need for a separate wearable ([1]) * On Googles business: "Mobile search and YouTube were the main drivers of Google's strong performance ... Google's market share ... is above 90 percent on mobile devices" ([1] [2] [3]) * "AI is the next platform for Facebook right now. The company is quietly approaching this initiative with the same urgency as its previous Web-to-mobile pivot." ([1]) * "Microsoft formed a new 5,000-person engineering and research team to focus on artificial intelligence products" ([1]) * Qi Lu leaves Microsoft for Baidu, and Jan Pedersen leaves Microsoft for Twitter. ([1] [2]) * Not sure how well known this is: "Facebook collects information about pages [you] visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons ... And in case that wasn't enough, Facebook also buys data about its users' mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers. Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards." ([1]) * Interesting example for the news industry: "Doubling down on traditional journalism and investing heavily in new ways to deliver it, through smartphone apps, voice-activated speakers and e-readers. The Post's digital effort has become the envy of the industry, with as many as 80 software engineers, developers and others working alongside reporters and editors to present the news in real time." ([1]) * "Bezos has worked to create a culture at Amazon that's hospitable to experimentation ... developing products customers will actually want to pay for ... experiments start small and grow over time ... a small team to experiment with the idea and find out if it's viable ... if a team succeeds in smaller challenges, it's given more resources and a larger challenge to tackle ... prioritize launching early over everything else ... learn as quickly as possible whether an idea that sounds good on paper is actually a good idea in the real world ... getting a product into the hands of paying customers as quickly as possible and taking their feedback seriously ... avoids wasting years working on products that don't serve the needs of real customers." ([1]) * New direction for the cloud, just small pieces of code running somewhere (you dont care where) and data stored somewhere (you dont care where), all auto scaled ([1] [2]) * "Many failed ideas have been resuscitated and rebranded as successful products and services, owned and managed by people other than their originators. Behind almost every popular app or website today lie numerous shadow versions that have been sloughed away by time. Yet recognition of the group nature of the enterprise would undermine a myth that legitimizes the consolidation of profit, for the most part, among a small group of people." ([1]) * For those of us tracking virtual reality: "While Facebook does not provide sales figures for the $599 Oculus Rift headset ... analysts believe they are slow. One research firm ... estimated the company sold only about 355,000 by the end of last year." ([1] [2] [3]) * A surprising level of detail here on what software development is like inside of Google. I agree with most of it, and highly recommend reading at least Section 2. ([1] [2]) * Great blog post summarizing NIPS 2016. Highlights are what wins Kaggle competitions, why deep learning works, latest twiddles to deep learning and reinforcement learning, why dialogs (chat) still doesnt work, and that Baidu has products whos only value is in the data they collect (not direct revenue, just the explore part of explore/exploit, learning how to be more effective). ([1]) * Ease of use is badly underrated: "Using TensorFlow makes me feel like I'm not smart enough to use TensorFlow; whereas using Keras makes me feel like neural networks are easier than I realized." ([1]) * New paper by Geoff Hinton and Jeff Dean, essentially a very large ensemble of neural networks with sparsity enforced to minimize the computational cost ([1]) * Thoughtful comments on engineering management ([1]) * Different people we work with in tech tend to have different ideas of what it means to get things done ([1]) * "People with different backgrounds bring new information. Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort." ([1]) * Meetings are expensive -- a 10 person meeting for an hour costs a few thousand dollars -- and people hate meetings too. Some good reoccurring themes here are to keep meetings small, short, write a tight agenda ahead of time, stay off your laptop and phone, and try to finish early. ([1]) * Disappointing game theory tidbit of the day, the Joy of Destruction game shows people enjoy causing harm when they can do it without consequences ([1] [2]) * Great data visualizations from 538, not just eye candy but convey information quickly ([1]) * "Tesla has 1.3 billion miles of car-driving data thanks to its Autopilot-equipped vehicles that are already on the road before competitors in Detroit and Silicon Valley can roll self-driving cars off the lot. It's a massive competitive advantage." ([1]) * Fun details on laying undersea internet cables from Amazon Web Services Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton ([1]) * "All future wars will begin as cyberwars" ([1]) * Impressive plans from Chinas space program, probes on the far side of the moon and on Mars in the next four years ([1]) * For those interested in education, MITs popular and excellent Scratch has published a dataset of how people learn computational thinking ([1]) * What Code.org has achieved is very impressive: "Trained 50,000 new K-12 computer science teachers ... More than 20 million lines of code have been written by ... more than one million K-12 students ... we expect to dramatically change the demographics of AP Computer Science this year" ([1]) * Funny article from The Onion on having too many browser tabs open ([1]) * SMBC comic on the universe as A/B testing ([1]) * SMBC comic on behavioral economics and anchoring ([1]) * SMBC comic: "The wise man was put to death in the most mathematically insulting way possible" ([1]) * Xkcd comic on what phones are, random emotional stimuli to replace boredom with anxiety ([1]) * Xkcd comic on being an overoptimizer ([1])
Some of the tech news that caught my attention lately: * Humans working for the AI: How we get ground truth for machine learning ([1]) * Deep learning helping on diagnostic medical imaging with accuracy at human level ([1] [2] [3] [4]) * BHAG from Intel: "Intel aims to deliver up to 100x reduction in the time to train a deep learning model over the next three years compared to GPU" ([1]) * Deep learnings success is mostly a lot of data paired with an algorithm that can take advantage of a lot of data ([1]) * Fun! "A software platform for evaluating and training intelligent agents across the world's supply of games, websites and other applications ... Agents use the same senses and controls as humans: seeing pixels and using a keyboard and mouse." ([1]) * Details on Duolingos learning algorithms, including that they found what worked best for students using A/B tests ([1]) * A rant on hype-driven development ([1] [2]) * Building finished products is hard ([1]) * "There is an optimal newness for ideas -- advanced yet acceptable" ([1]) * Massive expansion of Facebook in Seattle. Seattle is increasingly becoming a mini Silicon Valley ([1] [2]) * Andy Jassy optimistic Amazon Web Services will become a $100B business ([1]) * Detailed comparison of pricing on Google, AWS, and Azure. To summarize, its complicated, and what your cheapest option will be depends a lot on what youre doing. ([1]) * "Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and [in 2017] well be powered by 100% renewable energy as our newest wind and solar farms come online" ([1]) * Likely to see truly massive wind turbines in the near future ([1]) * "The Waffle House Index also stands for something less obvious. It is an indicator of how complex and long supply chains are — for food, for fuel, for power — and of what it takes to plan around infrastructure that can be fragile in unexpected ways." ([1]) * Xkcd: "Of course, Number of times Ive gotten to make a decision twice to know for sure how it would have turned out is still at 0." ([1]) * "Not one, nor two, but five major VC funds reached out about investing in Rocket AI ... The ultimate fake AI company ... AI is at peak hype, and everyone in the community knows it." ([1])
this book aptly serves as an opposing view for any idealism you may have been feeling about Silicon Valley startups or their bigger brethren. Some of us work in technology to make a difference. That is not what you will find in this book. It is a tale of a startup that wasnt really a startup, three people with no real product acquired after 10 months. It is a tale of sales and personal marketing, spinning unfavorable realities into golden-sounding tales capable of jumping the next hurdle and moving on to the next deal. It is a tale of greed and personal ambition, everything viewed through a Wall Street lens of climbing a hierarchy of wealth and power, some in the world of venture capital, and particularly detailed at Facebook. Facebook comes out of the book particularly poorly, as if Zuck is a some kind of fickle boy king holding court with his sycophants. During his time at Facebook, the author appears to try to join this clique, only to grow bitter when entry is rebuffed. Most interesting is the description of Facebooks struggle with advertising revenue, especially after its IPO. As the author describes it, Facebook couldnt figure out how to make the promised revenue. Eventually, in mid-2013 or so, they found a way, not by using data on what people do, but knowing who most people are, which turned out to be particularly important on mobile ("basic targeting like age and gender was a godsend to data-starved marketers ... data-wise, you have a first-party relationship with [only] a few apps"). The real value of Facebook turned out not to be its data on what people are doing, but merely being able to identify most people consistently and willing to exploit that to its fullest. It helps if you know at least a few of the personalities featured in the book. Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Chris Sacca, Greg Badros, and many others make at least brief appearances, usually to get splattered with the slime that drips from these pages. Many VCs and people at Facebook and Twitter are also mentioned, mostly described as the amoral whos who of the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley. Like many who got lucky, the author confuses luck with skill. Sure, that pitch meeting went well, but that meeting almost didnt happen. Success often was a result of a chance connection at the right time. In cases where the author angered someone with his arrogance or foolishness, someone should have killed the deal, and might have had they been in a slightly different mood that day. This startup was almost stillborn, barely making it into Y-combinator. The acqui-hire almost didnt happen, almost killed by lack of customer growth and shenanigans by the author. That everything worked out even as well as it did was mostly good fortune. To his credit, the author realizes some of this in the end. In the acknowledgments, he writes, "Lets be blunt: ours was a relationship of pure convenience, and I exploited you as much as you did me." But he also writes of some he encountered, "In a Valley world awash with mammoth greed and opportunism masquerading as beneficent innovation, you were the only real loyalty and idealism I ever encountered." Id like to think mammoth greed and opportunism have much smaller representation than idealistic innovation. Some may call me wishful, but I think pushing for that idealistic world to be true is part of making it true. This book is not going to stop me from thinking that tech companies should be a force for idealistic innovation and promise for the future. At least in my circles, most people I talk with are awash with idealism, a genuine belief that what they are working on can make things better for others. It saddens me to see that the authors perception of the tech industry is so different than my own.
Some of the tech news I found interesting lately, and you might too. Heavy on the comics this time to lighten the mood: * Jeff Bezos: "Good leaders ... seek to disconfirm their most profoundly-held convictions, which is very unnatural for humans ... Anybody who doesn't change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in." ([1]) * Amazon is hiring 120k employees just for the holidays. I cant believe how our baby is all grown up. ([1]) * On building products: "Keep it extremely simple, or two thirds of the population can't use your design" ([1] [2]) * "The problem isnt the users: its that weve designed our computer systems security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things." ([1]) * Fun AI experiments from Google. Dont miss "Quick, Draw!" ([1]) * Interesting new phone design, screen taking up the entire front: "Hands down, the best looking smartphone ever" ([1]) * Great article on Netflix recommendations, tidbits on the importance of reacting immediately to new data, using immediate intent, freshness (esp. new releases), and perceived quality (difference between online evaluation and offline). ([1]) * Opinionated summary of RecSys 2016, and also somewhat of a summary of recommendations and personalization research as of 2016 ([1] [2]) * Xavier Amatriain on lessons learned from building recommender systems ([1]) * YouTube is now using deep learning for recommendations, more than just embeddings, includes a ranker with heavily engineered features ([1]) * Ex-Facebook employee: "News Feed optimizes for engagement. As weve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging." ([1]) * Pfeffer: "You need to be careful with what you measure, because you are going to get it, and often you don't really want it." ([1] [2]) * Obama: "Traditionally, when we think about security and protecting ourselves, we think in terms of armor or walls. Increasingly, I find myself looking to medicine and thinking about viruses, antibodies." ([1]) * Surprising, just set up a hotspot, and the interference from peoples fingers moving in the WiFi signal is enough to catch most of the passwords anyone enters while connected ([1] [2]) * "An entire company's product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States" ([1] [2]) * Bit.ly short URLs hid malicious content that was then used to get at Colin Powells e-mail ([1]) * Carefully picked textures on eyeglass frames to fool face recognition, pictures in the paper are amusing ([1] [2]) * AI guru Andrew Ng: "Were lucky the AI community is very open, and top researchers freely share many ideas and even code. This helps the whole field progress. Hope we can keep it that way." ([1] [2]) * Love this: "Being able to go from idea to result with the least possible delay is key to doing good research" ([1]) * Two new massive labeled open data sets from Google, one for images, one for videos ([1] [2]) * "Translations that are vastly improved compared to the previous phrase-based production system. GNMT reduces translation errors by more than 55%-85% on several major language pairs" ([1]) * Google CEO Sundar Pichai: "Our goal is build a personal Google for each and every user." ([1]) * I got a mention in The Guardian for some of my past work: "Greg Linden may not be a household name..." ([1]) * Data on what Amazon Echo is actually used for. Mostly playing a song, it appears. ([1]) * Like at the last dot-com boom, there are a bunch of delivery services cropping up with models that dont seem like theyre likely to be profitable. Uber, which was in a better position than most to do this profitably, just shut their food delivery service down, which doesnt bode well for the others. ([1]) * Current state of virtual reality: "None of these uses are particularly compelling right now, especially given the cost of buying a VR headset. This may change in the future." ([1]) * "Giving employees hours, days or even months in which to work without close scrutiny has enhanced productivity instead of harming it" ([1]) * T-mobiles CEO on leadership: "Listen to your employees, listen to your customers, shut the f*** up, and do what they tell you" ([1]) * SMBC comic on survivorship bias ([1]) * SMBC comic on work, dark but funny: "The important thing is to find the low low bar that works for YOU." ([1]) * SMBC comic on eliminating security risks ([1]) * SMBC comic being a scientist. Dont miss the mouseover: "Hopefully your kids dont drink as much as research scientists" ([1]) * Love the mouseover text on this SMBC comic: "Studying social science has completely obliterated my ability to enjoy pleasant human behaviors" ([1]) * SMBC comic on political economy. Dont miss the mouseover text on humans: "In economics, theyre robots. In political economy, theyre all jerks. In sociology, theyre all misunderstood." ([1]) * Brilliant comic by Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) on happiness and meaning ([1]) * Xkcd on a CS degree: "That just means I understand how everything went so wrong" ([1])
A tightly curated list of what has caught my attention lately: * New Yorker on AI: "A lot of what people are calling artificial intelligence is really data analytics -- in other words, business as usual. If the hype leaves you asking What is A.I., really?, don't worry, youre not alone .... Intelligent software helps us interact and deal with the ... [information] onslaught ... winnowing an increasing number of inputs and options in a way that humans can't manage without a helping hand .... A set of technologies that try to imitate or augment human intelligence .... [But] we are a long way from creating virtual human beings ... In the meantime, were going to have to deal with the hyperbole surrounding A.I." ([1]) * Tim OReilly: "Humans are increasingly going to be interacting with devices that are able to listen to us and talk back .... [Alexa] demonstrates that conversational interfaces can work, if they are designed right .... Smaller domains where you can deliver satisfying results, and within those domains, spend a lot of time thinking through the fit and finish so that interfaces are intuitive, interactions are complete, and that what most people try to do just works." ([1]) * Netflix: "We think the combined effect of personalization and recommendations save us more than $1B per year" ([1] [2] [3]) * "The main reasons cited for using ad blockers include avoiding disruptive ads (69%), ads that slow down their browsing experience (58%) and security / malware risks (56%). Privacy wasn't the top answer. So Facebook thinks if its can make its ads non-interruptive, fast, [useful,] and secure, people won't mind." ([1] [2]) * According to the NYT, Uber lost $1.2B on $2.1B in revenue in H1 2016 ([1] [2]) * "Amazon reaches new high of 268,900 employees — skyrocketing 47% in just one year" ([1]) * Amazons going hard for Netflix on their key vulnerability, strength of the catalog ([1]) * Great example of how Bezos sees failure as just a step toward success, following up on their $170M loss from an expensive Amazon Fire Phone with another (and I think very promising) attempt using existing cheap phones ([1] [2]) * Talks from ScaledML 2016, including Jeff Dean, Qi Lu, Ilya Sutskever, and more ([1] [2]) * Great paper on the data pipelines at Facebook and some of their design tradeoffs ([1]) * Good article on Facebooks approach to research, not separate from engineering, not part of engineering, but just open ([1] [2]) * Great article in ACM Queue on Amazons microservices, which allows for "permissionless innovation" and has many benefits for testing, deployment, debugging, and reliability ([1] [2]) * Nice example of fine-grained control of data center power and cooling using machine learning to save electricity ([1]) * Precision agriculture using GPS, self-driving tractors, and crop and nutrient sensors ([1]) * Pew Internet study of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), lots of remarkable details, including that most workers are making less than $5/hour, almost all less than $8/hour ([1]) * "The line between outright deception and poor user design is often hard to distinguish" ([1]) * "[The] many confusing design decisions made us wonder if projects were assembled entirely from poor stackoverflow posts" ([1] [2]) * Amusing story of what happens when a geolocation is missing ([1]) * On education: "A feeling of hopefulness actually leads us to try harder and persist longer -- but only if it is paired with practical plans for achieving our goals, and specific, concrete actions we'll take when and if (usually when) our original plans don't work out as expected." ([1]) * On management: "We have to give them the space to fail in the short term so they can succeed and grow in the long term ... There is that magical moment when we delegate and allow an emerging leader to grow into their new responsibilities, and they end up being way better at it than we ever were. That's real management success." ([1] [2]) * On teams: "The best teams respect one another's emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally ... A shared belief that it is safe to take risks and share a range of ideas without the fear of being humiliated." ([1] [2]) * Comic on being data-driven and how it sometimes feels ([1]) * Xkcd on self-driving cars: "This car has 240% of a horses decision-making ability" ([1]) * Xkcd: "Is this a normal bug?" ([1]) * Xkcd on code quality ([1]) * SMBC comic on statisticians ([1]) * SMBC comic on economists and the golden goose, dont miss the mouseover text: "A physicist would figure out how the Goose was transmuting elements without getting to a high temperature, then use the trillions of dollars to build a really sweet fleet of quadcopters" ([1]) * SMBC comic that perfectly captures why I love talking with geeks, its the infectious enthusiasm ([1])
A tightly curated list of what I enjoyed in the news recently: * Bezos: "Every single important thing we've done has taken a lot of risk, risk-taking, perseverance, guts, and some have worked out. Most of them have not." ([1]) * Bezos: "You need to select people who tend to be dissatisfied ... As they go about their daily experiences, they notice that little things are broken in the world and they want to fix them. Inventors have a divine discontent." ([1]) * Page: "Is it going to affect everyone in the world? Very few ... think this way." ([1]) * "More than anything else, the rise of the bots signals the death of the mobile app ... The whole app thing didnt really work out." ([1] [2]) * "As it turns out, the mundanity of our regular lives is the most captivating thing we could share with one another" ([1]) * "This is the most demonically clever computer security attack Ive seen in years ... insert a nearly undetectable backdoor into the chips themselves" ([1]) * "Most Android vulnerabilities dont get patched. Its not Googles fault. It releases the patches, but the phone carriers dont push them down to their smartphone users ... This is a long-existing market failure." ([1]) * "It's not like iPhones have somehow gotten worse. Other phones, though? They've gotten a whole lot better. And they're cheap." ([1]) * "Google, with its tech chops and its control over digital ad delivery, is positioned to do what individual publishers and their associations can't do on their own, though, by requiring that ads are not obtrusive or annoying — a main reason people choose to block ads." ([1]) * "How quickly cars can learn to do the really hard parts of driving ... navigate congested cities in the pouring rain where humans, pets and rodents run into the road" ([1] [2] [3]) * "With so many advances in machine learning recently, it's not unreasonable to ask: why aren't my recommendations perfect by now?" ([1]) * "Developers' speed mattered ... only to the extent that we made effective product design choices ... It didn't matter how fast they were moving if they were moving in the wrong direction." ([1]) * "Building and growing startups may appear glamorous from the outside ... It is anything but that from the inside." ([1]) * "% of pitches for bots and/or AI companies approaching 100%" ([1]) * "Tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning ... for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries ... The field was largely ignored and underfunded during the AI winter of the 1980s and 1990s, when fashionable approaches to AI failed to match their early promise." ([1]) * The FizzBuzz Tensorflow interview "will probably only make sense to people who have gone through really terrible CS interview processes" ([1] [2]) * Remarkable, deep networks trained on artistic style, then used to apply those styles to video ([1]) * A good summary of the state-of-the-art in deep learning ([1]) * "There are limits to the predictive abilities of even tremendously superior intelligence (due to partial observability, chaotic behavior, or sheer randomness)" ([1] [2]) * SMBC comic: "Once you realize there is no hope, you can relax and just enjoy the progress in machine learning." ([1]) * My favorite old T-shirt from Amazon.com, Earths Biggest Bookstore ([1])
Code Monster from Crunchzilla is now open source, free to use and modify. Code Monster is a tutorial that has been used by hundreds of thousands of children around the world to learn a little about programming. Its a series of short lessons where each lesson involves reading and modifying a small amount of code. Changes to the code show up instantly, students learning by example and by doing. The lessons content for Code Monster from Crunchzilla is in a JSON file that can be modified fairly easily to create your own content. By open sourcing Code Monster from Crunchzilla, I hope three things might happen: * Translations. Taking the current content and translating into languages other than English for use in more classrooms around the world. * New lessons and new content. By adding new messages and example code to the JSON lessons file, new tutorials could be created for teaching programming games, working through puzzles or math problems, or perhaps a more traditional computer science curriculum aligned with a particular lesson plan. * Entirely new tutorials. Some ideas and techniques used by Code Monster, such as how Code Monster provides informative error messages, how it does live code, or how it avoids infinite loops in students code, might be useful for others creating web-based coding environments. Code Monster from Crunchzilla has been used in computer labs and classrooms around the world. One of the most common requests is translations into languages other than English. Now that the code is open source, I hope that makes it easier for translated and modified versions to get in front of even more children. If you use the code for anything that helps children learn computer programming, Id love to hear about it (please post a comment here or e-mail me at email@example.com).
What has caught my attention lately: * "We simply dont know how to securely engineer anything but the simplest of systems" ([1]) * Impressive at their scale: "Facebook ... releases software ... three times a day" and makes configuration changes "thousands of times a day... every single engineer can make live configuration changes." ([1]) * Pew Research report on global internet and smartphone usage ([1]) * Cute idea for telepresence: "We propose projecting [2D] virtual copies of people directly onto (potentially irregular) surfaces in the physical environment" ([1]) * For those of us tracking virtual reality, a detailed review of the Oculus Rift ([1]), a review of Hololens ([2]), and a fun TED talk motivating augmented and virtual reality ([3]) * For disk to be the new tape "custom disk designs uniquely targeting cold storage" are required that are "much larger, slower, more power efficient and less expensive." ([1]) Related, Google seeks new disk designs ([2]) * Lessons from building AWS, including automate everything and favor primitives over frameworks ([1]) * In the AWS service terms: "However, this restriction will not apply ... [when] human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue." ([1]) * Google says, "With multi-homing ... failover, recovery, and dealing with inconsistency ... are solved by the infrastructure, so the application developer gets high availability and consistency for free and can focus instead on building their application" ([1] [2]) * Remarkably successful contest: "The winning team exceeded the power density goal for the competition by a factor of 3 ... Some of us at Google didn't think such audacious goals could be achieved." ([1]) * "Welcome to the Internet of Things... and its tradeoffs" ([1] [2] [3]) * Netflixs catalog has dropped to 5,532 titles from 8,103 titles in about two years ([1] [2]) * "The James Webb Space Telescope will be a major advance ... primary mirror will be 50 times [larger] ... eight times the resolution" ([1]) * "The price of planetary insurance, it turns out, isn't all that high." ([1] [2]) * Teaching math: "In most people's everyday lives ... what [people] do need is to be comfortable reading graphs and charts and adept at calculating simple figures in their heads ... Decimals and ratios are now as crucial as nouns and verbs." ([1]) * Hes the "'seagull of science.' He used to fly in, squawk, crap over everything, and fly away." ([1]) * Good answer to the question, "What are the most important things for building an effective engineering team?" ([1]) Related, similar advice from Amit Singh ([2] [3]) * An old Amazon.com office map from early 1997 (back when Amazon only sold books, "Earths Biggest Bookstore"). My "office" was a card table in a kitchen. ([1]) * What If comic: What would happen if you tried to squeeze all the water going over Niagara Falls into a straw? Its worse than youd think. ([1]) * Xkcd comic on bots: ""Python flag: Enable three laws" ([1]) * Good Xkcd comic on Celsius or Fahrenheit ([1]) * SMBC comic: "Philosophy tip: Make any sentence profound by adding true to it" ([1]) * Dilbert comic: "No need for conversation. I know everything about you." ([1]) * Comic with a Calvin and Hobbes crossover into Bloom County, brings back memories ([1])
Virtual reality is hot again, with dedicated hardware headsets launching from multiple manufacturers intended for general use. The world is substantially different than the last time this happened. In particular, theres more computing power available in our smartphones than the most powerful graphics workstations had back in the 1990s. Google Cardboard and others take advantage of that, using a smartphone and little else for a quick-and-dirty virtual reality experience. But, for a product to appeal to a broad market -- to get beyond early adopters with disposable income seeking to show something cool to friends a couple times -- it needs to survive the harsh judgement of busy people. It isnt enough for virtual reality on expensive dedicated hardware to mostly work. The experience will have to wow repeatedly at a price people like. So, Daniel and I have another bet: "Virtual reality hardware (not counting cardboard) will not sell more than 10M units/year worldwide before March 2019." Im saying it wont. Daniel says it will. Loser donates $100 to the winners choice of charity. Daniel already posted his side of the bet. In brief, he thinks three years will be enough time for someone to get it right. I think that mainstream adoption of dedicated hardware for virtual reality requires breakthroughs in usability and price that are too difficult to achieve in the three year time frame. The experience just isnt good enough yet for it to be anything other than a toy for early adopters. Current virtual reality hardware is bulky, expensive, not fully immersive, and not addictive or compelling beyond the initial wow. I expect even the next generation will just be a niche market (low million units per year) until we see major developments on price, form factor, and quality of the experience. There are several wild cards here. For example, it is possible that much cheaper units can be made to work. Its possible that someone discovers very carefully chosen environments and software tricks fool the brain into fully accepting the virtual reality, especially for gaming, increasing the appeal and making it a must-have experience for a lot of people. As unsavory as it is, pornography is often a wild card with new technology, potentially driving adoption in ways that can determine winners and losers. A breakthrough in display (such as retinal displays) might allow virtual reality hardware that is much cheaper and lighter. Business use is another unknown where virtual reality could provide a large cost savings over physical presence. I do think there are many ways in which I could lose this bet. Like Daniel, Ill add some constraints to make my side of the bet even harder. Id be surprised if dedicated virtual reality hardware sells more than 10M total over all three years. Id also be surprised if virtual reality using smartphones (like Google Cardboard) goes beyond a toy, so, is used regularly by tens of millions for gaming, education, or virtual tourism. And, like Daniel, I expect virtual reality to be big eventually, am frustrated by our current computing limitations, and think we should work to have much better from our computing devices today.
In 2012, Professor Daniel Lemire and I bet $100 over the question of whether tablets would replace PCs. Specifically, the bet was, "In some quarter of 2015, the unit sales of tablets will be at least twice the unit sales of traditional PCs, in the USA." Loser donates $100 USD to the charity of the winners choice. Its 2016, and tablet sales went far higher than I ever expected, approaching PC sales, roughly 60M/year units for both tablets and PCs in the US. But tablet sales seem to have peaked, with Q4 2015 unit sales worldwide actually 14% lower than the previous year, which is worse than the 8% decline in PC sales. There are other surprises. One of my concerns was that a very cheap tablet would dominate the market, and Amazon did come out with a $50 tablet that got relatively good reviews and nearly tripled Amazons market share on tablets. There hasnt been enough time yet to see what happens with very cheap tablets, but tablets this cheap are a different category than the tablets that were around in 2012. Another concern at the time was hybrid tablets, so tablets with detachable keyboards that function a lot like laptops, and whether theyd blur the line between PC and tablet. Hybrid tablets have done very well -- a major category in tablets -- and look likely to continue to grow over time. The last concern at the time was whether tablets could thrive despite the pressure from increasingly larger and more powerful mobile phones. That seems to have been the biggest issue. Phablets are getting as large as early tablets, and tablets that try to be much bigger than a smartphone proved too unwieldy and sold poorly. After all, who needs a tablet when youve got a mobile thats almost as large? The broader question in the bet was whether people would stop using PCs. PC sales have been in decline, though the pace of that decline has slowed recently. What seems to be happening is that people are continuing to use multiple devices, which was a visible trend back in 2012. A phone is great when you want to do something quickly on the run. A bigger screen is good when you need to do a lot of reading. A keyboard, mouse, and large screen become useful when youre producing instead of consuming. If you need to do all of these, theres no reason to only have a phone, only a tablet, or only a PC. Instead, people often have all three and more. Even though I technically won this bet, I want to congratulate Daniel Lemire on this getting much closer than I ever expected. I also admire the bravery he had to take the bet, especially with such favorable terms, and appreciate what I learned from this. The terms were that the loser donate $100 to the charity of the winners choice, and Id like to match the donation. Daniel and I will both be donating $100 to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. UPDATE: Daniels post is up: "Lost my bet: the PC isnt dead... yet".
What caught my attention recently: * "Big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs .... As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act .... the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough" ([1]) * Lots of details on recommendations, personalization, and experimentation at Netflix in a new ACM paper ([1]) * Fun and interesting Slate article on how Facebook selects posts for the news feed ([1]) * New paper claims the filter bubble for news is much stronger in what people self-select and on social media than in search and recommendations ([1]) * "Bayesian program learning (BPL) framework, capable of learning a large class of visual concepts from just a single example and generalizing in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from people" ([1] [2] [3]) * NIPS 2015 paper on problems that accumulate in machine learning systems, such as dependencies between features, dependencies between models that build off each other, and complicated and fragile data preprocessing ([1]) * "Should they teach [self-driving] cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" ([1]) * Wal-mart is doing poorly against Amazon, which is surprising, I think ([1]) * Good article on product management. I particularly like the points that most products fail (so you should expect to experiment, adapt, and iterate) and that a good product is about experiences not features ([1]) * "People keep mentioning how different things are to the period just before the AI winter" ([1]) * "Smartwatches still have a long way to go in terms of proving their usefulness, necessity, and style" ([1]) * "CYA security: given the choice between overreacting to a threat and wasting everyones time, and underreacting and potentially losing your job, its easy to overreact." ([1]) * A new $7M XPrize for autonomous undersea drones ([1] [2]) * Simulating the World in Emoji is a very fun educational simulation, similar to the Artificial Life work a while back, great for kids ([1]) * From the Exploratorium Museum, a demo of how wave motion arises from swirling smaller movements in water ([1]) * Dilbert comic on tech jargon ([1]) * Pearls Before Swine comic on clickthrough agreements ([1]) * SMBC comic: "Update 9.1.2.001.241 has been a test of your loyalty." ([1])
Im joining Microsoft! Ill be part of the excellent Analysis and Experimentation team, helping people learn from data. Im excited! Ive been geeking out with big data from before data science was a thing and before being a geek ever could be considered a compliment. For two decades, Ive enjoyed looking at the paths people take online, where they find success and where they become annoyed, and how changes can help more find success. Sometimes this is prioritizing things people like and find useful. Sometimes it is changing or eliminating things that, despite the good intentions of the developers and designers, dont work for people. Sometimes it is anonymously sharing things that only some people found with others who havent found it yet. And sometimes it is having humility about being able to guess what will work and deciding to try many things to discover what actually does work. If youre at Microsoft, whether an old friend, a team looking to talk about recommendations, personalization, data science, and experimentation, or just looking to chat, please get in touch! Id love to hear from you.
What has caught my attention lately: * Tog (of the famous Tog on Interface) says Apple has lost its way on design: "Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people's true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them." ([1] [2]) * Good advice on adding features to a product: "Great or Dead, as in, if we cant make a feature great, it should be killed off." ([1]) * Great data on smartphone and tablet ownership. Sometimes its hard to remember that only five years ago most people didnt have smartphones. ([1]) * Advice for anyone thinking of doing a startup. Heres the conclusion: "So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;)" ([1]) * Related, a Dilbert comic on the value of a startup idea ([1]) * "People might think that human-level AI is close because they think AI is more magical than it actually is" ([1]) * "VCs hate technical risk. They're comfortable with market risk, but technical risk is really difficult for them to reconcile." ([1]) * Google finds eliminating bad advertisements increases long-term revenue, concluding: "A focus on user satisfaction could help to reduce the ad load on the internet at large with long-term neutral, or even positive, business impact." ([1] [2]) * "Crappy ad experiences are behind the uptick in ad-blocking tools" ([1]) * On filter bubbles, a new study finds algorithms yield more diversity of content than people choosing news themselves ([1] [2] [3]) * Facebook data center fun: "The inclusion of 480 4 TB drives drove the weight to over 1,100 kg, effectively crushing the rubber wheels." ([1]) * Great data on who uses which social networks ([1]) * "One of the great mysteries of the tech industry in recent years has been the seeming disinterest of Google, which is now called Alphabet, in competing with Amazon Web Services for corporate customers." ([1]) * "Maybe part of AWS value prop is the outsourcing of outages: when half the net is offline, any individual down site doesnt look as bad." ([1]) * "87% of Android devices are vulnerable to attack by malicious apps ... because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates" ([1]) * Fun maps showing where tourists take photos compared to locals ([1] [2] [3]) * Multiple camera lenses, an idea soon coming to mobile phones too? ([1]) * Another interesting camera technology: "17 different wavelengths ... software analyzes the images and finds ones that are most different from what the naked eye sees, essentially zeroing in on ones that the user is likely to find most revealing" ([1]) * And another: "Take a short image sequence while slightly moving the camera ... to recover the desired background scene as if the visual obstructions were not there" ([1]) * Useful to know: "Survey results are mostly unaffected when the non-Web respondents are left out." ([1]) * Surprising finding, meal worms can thrive just eating styrofoam: "the larvae lived as well as those fed with a normal diet (bran) over a period of 1 month" ([1]) * Autonomous drone for better-than-GoPro filming? ([1] [2]) * "We see people turning onto, and then driving on, the wrong side of the road a lot ... Drivers do very silly things when they realize they're about to miss their turn ... Routinely see people weaving in and out of their lanes; we've spotted people reading books, and even one [driver] playing a trumpet." ([1]) * A fun and cool collection of messed up images out of Apple maps. Its almost art. ([1]) * SMBC comic, also applies to AI ([1])
It was a surprise, to me at least, that I wasnt able to find a good fit at Google Seattle. Google nowadays is different than I expected, and, after four months of trying hard to find any way to make it what I wanted, I resigned. Im saddened and disappointed. On the bright side, I did get a chance to work with many remarkable people, which I think made it worthwhile.
Findory and beyond, but, like many blogs, posts have slowed in recent years. Unfortunately, I dont expect to be able to post much here in the coming months either. Thanks for reading all these years. I hope you enjoyed this blog, and I hope to be able to post frequently again at some point in the future.
Some of the best of what Ive been thinking about lately: * Amazon now has 109 warehouses and 165k employees. Wow. ([1]) * Amazon cloud computing has 17% operating margins, surprisingly high given all the competition ([1] [2]) * Microsoft appears to be claiming theyre going to be bigger than Amazon AWS in three years ([1]) * But Amazons Andy Jassy says, "One of the biggest surprises around this business has been how long it took the old guard companies to try and pursue an offering. None of us thought we would get a seven-year head start." ([1]) * Apple is the iPhone ([1]) * Great article on the history of YouTube: "Its easy to forget YouTube almost didnt make it" ([1]) * Mobile ads still arent targeted (unlike Web ads) ([1] [2]) * Browsers are disabling Java and Silverlight by default, and Flashs days might be numbered ([1]) * Surprising how few people use their mobile to get directions, look up public transit, or request a taxi ([1]) * A major predictor of how much people like a picture of a face is how sharp and clear the eyes are in the photo ([1]) * Successful tests of a bullet-sized guided missile, cool but very scary ([1] [2]) * "If an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know" ([1]) * "Maybe this head-up display for your life starts as a head-up display for your car" ([1]) * Beginning of the end for radio: "Norway the first country in the world to decide upon an analogue switch-off for all major radio channels" ([1]) * A new trend in biology, collecting large amounts of data and doing A/B testing ([1] [2])
a long interview with the Internet History Podcast mostly about Amazon around 1997, especially the personalization, recommendation engine, and data-driven innovations at Amazon, and the motivation behind them. I think the interview a lot of fun. It gives a view of what Amazon was like way back when it was just a bookstore only in the US, had just one webserver, and we barely could keep the website up with all the growth. Lots of history of the early days of the web, well before CSS and Javascript, before cookies were even widely supported, and before scale out, experimentation and A/B testing, and large scale log analysis were commonplace. Give the podcast a listen if you are interested in what the Web looked like back in 1997 and the motivation behind Amazons personalization and recommendations.
What Ive been thinking about lately: * "The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body ... 35 microamps of power per megahertz of processing ... and less than 200 nanoamps ... in deep sleep mode" ([1]) * "Forgetting may be nearly as important as remembering in humans" ([1]) * Only 40% of people use maps on their smartphone ([1] [2]) * OkCupid and Dataclysm: "In the age of Big Data, the empirical has deciphered the intimate" ([1]) * Cross functional teams might seem slower when youre in them, but, long-term, are more productive ([1]) * Very good article on mostly evil uses of personalization ([1] [2]) * "Fake accounts are given a veneer of humanity by copying profile information and photos from elsewhere ... [and] a picture of a beautiful woman" ([1]) * "Because almost no one patches their BIOSes, almost every BIOS in the wild is affected by at least one vulnerability" ([1]) * Cracking by forcing non-random memory errors, just about all RAM chips currently used are vulnerable ([1] [2] [3]) * Computer security "backdoors will always turn around and bite you in the ass. They are never worth it." ([1] [2]) * "Facts can only do so much. To avoid coming to undesirable conclusions, people can fly from the facts and use other tools in their deep belief protecting toolbox" ([1]) * Why TV is losing viewers, the ads are annoying: "Decline caused by a migration of viewers from ad-supported platforms to non-ad-supported, or less-ad-supported platforms" ([1]) * "The same dysfunctional folie a deux playing out between credulous tech media and even more credulous VC investors" ([1]) * Does the difficulty of building intelligent systems grow exponentially as we make progress? That question has big implications for whether we should expect (or fear) an AI singularity. ([1]) * Very fun version of Family Feud using Google search suggestions ([1] [2]) * Do you know what you dont know? Try this confidence calibration quiz. ([1]) * Love this quote: "I have thrown away a number of successful careers out of boredom" ([1]) * Humor related to recommendation systems: "An exciting new system that takes all the bother, all the deciding, all the paying—all the shopping—out of shopping." ([1]) * Two SMBC comics related to AI ([1] [2])
Crunchzilla just launched Data Maven! Data Maven from Crunchzilla is a light introduction to statistics and data analysis. For too many teens and adults, if they think about statistics at all, they think its boring, tedious, or too hard. Too many people have had the experience of trying to learn statistics, only to get bogged down in probability, theory, and math, without feeling that they were able to do anything with it. Instead, your first exposure to statistics should be fun, interesting, and mostly easy. Data Maven from Crunchzilla is more of a game than a tutorial. To play, you answer questions and solve problems using real data. Statistics is your tool, and data provides your answers. At the end of Data Maven, youll not only know a bit about statistics, but also maybe even start to think of statistics as fun! Like programming, statistics and data analysis are tools that make you more powerful. If you know how to use these tools, you can do things and solve problems others cannot. Increasingly, across many fields, people who understand statistics and data analysis can know more, learn more, and discover more. Data Maven is not a statistics textbook. It is not a statistics class. It is an introduction. Data Maven demystifies statistics. Teens and adults who try Data Maven build their intuition and spark their curiosity for statistics and data. Please try Data Maven yourself! And please tell others you know who might enjoy it too!


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Amid the whirlwind of the Battle of Tarawa, Japanese soldiers dash for cover as nearby Marines open fire. A cameraman, then–Staff Sergeant Norman Hatch, captured the gripping scene—the only instance that U.S. servicemen and enemy forces appeared in the same World War II combat images. But the footage was only a fraction of what Hatch filmed on Tarawa's Betio Atoll, the highlights of which appeared in a short documentary, With the Marines at Tarawa. The historic film brought the grim realities of Pacific island fighting to the American home front and earned the 1945 Academy Award for best short-subject documentary. Retired… Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the 'Tarawa' Category
Sep 2
Tales from a Tarawa Marine
Friday, September 2, 2016 3:05 PM
By Fred H. Allison
In the course of my duties as the oral historian for the U.S. Marine Corps History Division, I interview Marines, all ranks and all time periods. I was made aware of Lieutenant Colonel Roy H. Elrod in an unusual manner: through family friends from Muleshoe, Texas. This is where I grew up and, coincidentally, where Roy grew up, but about 30 years apart. Now Roy and I live within five miles of each other, but more than 1,500 miles from Muleshoe, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was quite impressed when I met Roy. Here he was 93 years old; he lived… Read the rest of this entry »

subset: commoncrawl


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What You'll Get
Without Pilates training, people would only hold the limbo pole when they needed a low-lying fence, low-difficulty hurtle, or high-maintenance clothing rack. Give the stretchy stick a purpose with today's Groupon: for $40, you get three mat classes and one private lesson at 6 Keys Pilates (up to a $110 value).
At 6 Keys Pilates, dedicated instructors guide students through individual and group sessions designed to increase flexibility and boost overall physical wellness. During mat classes, limber students enjoy the simplistic comforts of both small class sizes (typically less than five students per class) and stripped-down equipment (a mat, a motivating voice, and an obliging muscular frame). Private lessons are matched in terms of enthusiasm, and they feature the additional perks of personalized attention and a variety of resistance-driven equipment. Classes are available throughout the week in both the morning and evening hours. For complete information, check the class schedule online.
The Fine Print
Promotional value expires Jul 7, 2011. Amount paid never expires. Limit 2 per person, may buy multiple as gifts. By appointment only. Not valid with other offers. Merchant is solely responsible to purchasers for the care and quality of the advertised goods and services.


text: I just recently got the DSTWO and i've had it for about a week and I have been disappointed thus far. Before I talk about my issues; I reformatted my Kingston 16gn micro-sd with the panasonic sd reformatter. I have also updated the firmware to 1.05 and EOS to 1.02 which is the latest versions for this DS Cart. I got the card to replace my R4DS and I expected to not have problems, right? Wrong! I have had non-stop problems with this cart. Now I have really tried hard to be patient with this cart and I understand that it may have issues due to its early life although the thing is almost unusable. -I am limited to about less than a hour of batterly life vs the 4-5 hours I got out of my R4DS. This is even when not using the GBA emulator. -The GBA emulator is super SLOW even when using the extra compatibility .txt file from filetrip. The file got some games to work now but most aren't playable. -Even though I updated my cart firmware to 1.05, I still frequently get the NO SD card error frequently using it on auto-mode. -The freezes are just terrible too... It seems like if the game lasts 5 minutes without freezing, then it won't freeze at all during the length of time I play. The bad thing is that it freezes about 9 out of the 10 times I play. The weird thing too is that even when the game freezes, the music will keep playing fine. It does this on multiple games that I have tried and the in-game DSTWO menu will not come up during the freezes although if I restart the DS, everything will work like normal again. -The usb micro-sd card reader that came with the DSTWO died in the first day while copying stuff to my micro-sd card but I have another card reader that came with the R4...which still works . -My DSTWO did not come with a wrist strap. This is a minor gripe but it would have been nice to have one. Do you guys have any solutions? I really don't want to have to send this card back to ShopTemp. Thanks.


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Proven Steps to Fill Your Sales Pipeline with Stephen Woessner
November 9, 2017 @ 8:00 am - 1:30 pm$45 - $75
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Stephen will teach you how to build your own Trojan Horse of Sales – a complete business development system that you and your business can use to tackle challenges and meet goals.


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Love Notes Passed in Public School
There are few things more gratifying in the fashion industry than seeing talent blossom before your eyes. We take a certain level of responsibility in it, we relish in the delight of not knowing where it's going. Much like the rest of the world, my first real exposure to Jack and Lazaro of Proenza Schouler was around the time of their Fashion Fund award in 2004. Easy call. They were incredibly artistic, gorgeous and so distinctively New York. Then you have the Doo.Ri(s) of the world who rode off of the industry's expectations long after her relevance in high fashion had deflated. With that uncertainty being what it is, you fall in love with caution. You try not to follow the herd for fear that you may give your heart and lose them.
Recently we've been experiencing a surge in interest in high fashion brands who count "street" in either their roots or influence. HBA, Surface to Air and notably Public School. It's hard to compete with the level of hype surrounding Public School. The brand identity, the hard to define woman they dress, the designers themselves. It's all nothing short of intoxicating. These are the guys you want to win. My inappropriate crush on the happily married Dao-Yi Chow aside, these guys are magnetic. They have a passion and a point of view that rivals anyone on the horizon right now. It's easy with them. I take an immense amount of snobby pride in my ability to suss out the counterfeits. So much so that oftentimes I'm quick to dismiss based on my need to play devil's advocate.The initial explosion of attention around Public School made me wary. In all areas of culture, luxury markets like to flirt with the idea of exposing "street" trends to a luxury audience. Grunge, graffiti, cheap drugs, metal, hip hop, baby hair. With this said, I approached the duo with trepidation. It looked good to me, on the boys I nuzzled wearing it — it felt good to me. But I was hesitant. Is it a gimmick? Is the CFDA using the undeniably talented PS duo to promote their efforts in diversity, will they and the consumers they dress be used as symbols of a fixed time moment in fashion? Most importantly was I sipping the proverbial kool-aid?
Fashion makes you a cynic. As my obsession with PS grew I not only felt guilty about doubting the authenticity but cringed at my own expectations of how far they would go. My skepticism was with the industry not the talents of the designers themselves. Maxwell and Dao combined come from strong backgrounds in both "urban" fashion and media. Public School, as a brand has become a moniker for how we now define "streetwear", as in brands with a clear aesthetic influence rooted in the street. As we ride these incredibly fine lines between "urban" and "streetwear" what are the rules and who is making them? In a Fashionista.com interview with Hood By Air's Shayne Oliver when asked if he considered his work streetwear he responded "I don't get what that means really. Like does 'street' mean what people wear on the subway? I think it's a categorization that's just lazy. People wear different things in the street all over the world". Shayne's point is valid and brings up an overdue conversation. Whose street are we referring to? As brands defined this way become more and more global, is the categorization divisive. Several events in the past couple of years have blurred these lines further. In addition to the meteoric rise of brands like HBA, Harvey Nichols launched a collaborative design event with fashion and music collective #BeenTrill. Versace's recent creative rape of Kesh for American Apparel has resulted in a legal issue quite the opposite of what we're used to seeing. The copyright lawsuit reflects a "trickle up" pattern. Consecutive events like these all happening on the same stage changes the fashion vernacular. In 1992, Steven Meisel featured a bare faced Nadja Auermann with her nose ring, the next year Marc Jacobs nearly tanked his career with his reinvention of Perry Ellis. The year after that, Kurt Cobain, who unexpectedly and unwillingly became a style icon died suddenly. By 1995, grunge was no longer a thing fashion accepted but rather a thing we discovered and subsequently absorbed. A thing that buried its positioning in the middle of our mindset of what we thought we knew about fashion. Grunge no longer "met" high fashion. They cohabitated. It became a reference. Street is an influence, not a category.
In William Van Meter's NY Times article on the duo of PS, Meter gives a short paragraph to discuss their categorization as Streetwear. Dao is quoted in the article as saying 'Luxury designers like Riccardo Tisci can say most of their inspiration comes from the street; We started from a street base, but our influences are higher fashion'. Well said Dao. In an unneeded clarification of Dao's quote Meter goes on to say "In other words, Public School makes street clothes aiming to be fashion instead of fashion trying to be street." From my understanding, Dao wasn't saying that at all. An "aim" wasn't implied. By using Riccardo Tisci as an example (who is about as luxury and non-American as you can get), I understood that any high fashion designer can use the street as an influence without being categorized. Tisci is no more trying to be "street" as Osborne and Chow are trying to be "fashion".
It is an outdated term or rather it is outdated usage. Fewer and fewer articles being written on Public School make an effort to define their "street meets whatever" style. This week Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow were named Creative Directors of DKNY. It's a massive moment in the American fashion structure. Choices are being made based on growth potential and true consumer appreciation, not the attempt to capitalize on a passing phase of cool. In all honesty, two minority designers with brands like Sean John and Ecko on their resumes not being pigeonholed as urban designers is a moment of growth for the fashion industry.


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Dark Chocolate Gingersnaps 5lb
These crunchy gingersnaps have been perfectly spiced then covered with rich and creamy dark chocolate for a unique and delicious dessert treat. Enjoy these gingersnaps with a tall glass of milk or use them as an ingredient in other baked good recipes. Try crushing them and sprinkling over top of your favorite iced cakes and cupcakes or scoop of ice cream for an extra special treat.
Ing: Dark chocolate(sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, (an emulsifier), vanilla), center (enriched flour (wheat flour niacin, reduced iron, thiamine, mononitrate (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), folic acid), sugar, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, molasses, ginger, sodium bicarbonate (leavening), caramel color, salt, soy lecithin (an emulsifier), cinnamon, cloves, nonfat dry milk, and red pepper) **Contains: Milk, Soy, and Wheat. **Allergy Information; This product made in facility that processes peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat and dairy products.
Last Changed: 3/26/2013


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A Massachusetts technology lawsuit between Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates Inc. (VSEA) and a group of its investors is heating up; shareholders claim they will be shortchanged by a $4.9 billion takeover offer from Applied Materials Inc. (AMAT).
As we reported recently, Massachusetts business law attorneys have seen an increase in merger and acquisition activity with the beginnings of the economic rebound. And while an experienced law firm is always required to handle such complex transactions, technology startups are best served by having experienced legal representation during the formation and investment stage. How a business is formed — and how investors are brought on board — can go a long way toward determining investor rights during such disputes.
In this case (Crane v. Varian Semiconductors, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts), investor David Crane contends members of the board of directors of Varian violated U.S. securities laws, issued misleading proxy materials, and failed to fully explain the sales process. The lawsuit also alleges that it's unclear why the board chose to negotiate exclusively with Applied Materials Inc. Crane contends shareholders will not receive a fair price unless the transaction is stopped by a court.
Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates Inc. is based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The company designs, manufacturers and services semiconductor processing equipment used to make integrated circuits. The company has more than 3,000 high current, medium current and high energy implanters installed at facilities throughout the world. The systems implant more than 5 million wafers per day.
Applied Materials Inc., based in Santa Clara, California, provides equipment, services and software to manufacturers of semi conductor, flat panel display and solar photovoltaic products. Applied agreed to buy the company in anticipation of increased demand for microchip technology used in mobile devices. News of the lawsuit sent Varian stock up slightly; the stock has risen 66 percent so far this year.
Applied announced the signing of the merger agreement in May, which valued Varian at $63 a share. At the time, the price represented a 55 percent premium to Varian's closing stock price. Upon completion of the deal, it was announced that Varian would operate as a business unit of Applied's and would continue to be based on Gloucester.
"We believe the opportunity is very attractive for Varian's customers, employees and shareholders," Varian's chief executive officer Gary Dickerson said at the time. "In addition to our combined strengths in the semiconductor space, Applied's proven capability to extend its technology to adjacent markets like solar and display can help unlock the tremendous potential of ion implantation in these markets."
Varian is a manufacturer of the ion implantation technology, which is currently used in Internet applications, personal computing and telecommunications. The companies have said the their combined efforts should open new markets for the technology.
The stock is currently trading at about $61 a share.
The Massachusetts business law attorneys at The Brown Law Firm, LLC are available for no-cost, confidential consultations. Call (617) 489-0817.


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NOTE: Gina Robertson, our long-time friend and member of the Life Purpose Planning team, offered us her thoughts on "world changing". We'd like to share them with you as well.
For the last few years, I've found myself growing a bit cynical when it comes to "being a world-changer." I regularly encounter the young, invincible 18-year-old who heads out into the unknown ready to conquer whatever is before them. Failure isn't even a thought while the glow of excitement and anticipation oozes from their pores. To this I generally say, "Do it! Change the world!" yet under my breath I add "while you still think you can." They are on the brink of their God-given journey with full expectation!
But what do you do when you get a few "hard knocks" or when God doesn't immediately fulfill all of your dreams? What do you do when you wake up and realize that you're in this journey for the "long haul" and that it's not going to be an all-nighter blitz to fully live out your purpose? As I've trudged along, I've often wondered deep down if the "good ol' days" have come and gone."
Recently the Lord jolted me back to reality through the movie, RED (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) and a statement from my Dad (Dewey Novotny). My dad mentioned that many individuals don't view themselves as a world-changer anymore because they are living in their past deeds and accomplishments. In reality, their world has just changed! This has been my case… our little team has moved on, gotten married and live very busy lives. In some cases, it's been like pushing a dream uphill… and after a while, that just gets discouraging. Then, in the movie RED, I watched retired CIA agents come out of the woodwork to bring justice once again to the world. Something in the movie stirred my heart as I identified with the agent in the nursing home… and another agent arranging a bouquet of roses. The gray hairs on their heads brought a certain "calm" in the midst of a chaotic plot and threat for extinction. With synergistic efforts, these seasoned veterans nonchalantly grabbed the old tools and talents from their past and moved into the future!
I've been delaying my attendance to the WC Summit because I never wanted to paint a picture of perfection or squash myself into a stereotypical mold that goes along with being a "world-changer." However, with a few gray hairs on my 30-year-old head, I'm packing my tools, dreams, plans and can't wait to rub shoulders those changing the world in a world of change!
With great expectation,
Gina C Robertson
PS. I highly recommend the use of TV Guardian or ClearPlay if you watch RED.


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When discussing ventriculocisternostomy with our neurosurgery residents we used the following video clips. From fornix00:
NEUROSURGIC Blog and News channel
NEUROSURGIC Blog and News channel
|NEUROSURGIC Blog and News channel is a collection of blog entries about various neurosurgical matters, submitted by community members, and News updates, submitted by company members. Click on an authors name, either in some blog entry or in the Bloggers module to the right, to go to that members blog. Click on the profile image in a blog entry to go to the author´s member page. Read about blogs and blogging in the About NEUROSURGIC. Please observe that it is not allowed to submit information disclosing patient-identification.
The Rules of the Game
In the first chapter of Frank Vertosicks book "When the Air Hits Your Brain" an older colleague tells him the following rules of neurosurgery during his first day as a resident: 1. You ain ...
Resident duty hour regulation
In J Neurosurgery Vol 110 Dr Sean Grady et al. discuss the resident duty hour regulation in the USA. According to the paper the current limited duty hours for residents in the USA is 80 hours per week ...
How you become a Neurosurgeon in my country
GreetingsIn the Hospital Universitario de Caracas, Venezuela, in order to be a neurosurgeon, it will take you 5 years to complete, in the first year you are able to operate shunts and hematoma evacu ...


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EBER — Kayla Hall's single brought home Maddie Cox with the winning run in the eighth inning Monday as East Clinton defeated Miami Trace 11-10 in South Central Ohio League softball action.
East Clinton out-hit Miami Trace 19-8 but had to work overtime for the victory. Tori Bailey led EC with four hits.
There were nine lead changes in the back and forth game.
In the eighth inning, Cox led off with a single to left. She moved to second on Bailey's hit. Hall then hit a line drive up the middle that Trace's pitcher was unable to field, allowing Cox to score the game-winning run.
April 18, 2016
@Miami Trace
East Clinton 11 Miami Trace 10
(11) EAST CLINTON (ab-r-h-rbi) Osborne 5-1-2-0 Spence 4-1-2-1 Cox 5-3-2-1 Bailey 5-1-4-2 Rice 0-0-0-0 Dunn 4-0-2-1 Durbin 2-1-0-0 Hall 3-1-2-2 Boeckmann 5-1-2-0 Pirman 4-1-1-1 Smith 3-1-2-2. TOTALS 40-11-19-10
2B: Baile
SB: Cox
SAC Spence, Smith 2 Dunn
Christian (W) 8-8-10-6-5-2


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To view the original, well referenced blog post look here, from Toronto physiotherapist Laura McIntyre.
So is active care and exercise important? (Yes, this is rhetorical.)
- Compared to the top image… which do you like the looks of better?
- Image 2: Sedentarism?
- Image 3: Active lifestyle?
You will see the active triathlete with significantly more muscle mass, less fatty (adipose) tissue, and denser bones. More muscle, less fat, & stronger bones. Sound like something you might want to be part of?
I once heard Craig Liebenson, DC say that we need patients to 'fear inactivity, more than they fear activity'. To add context this includes having someone knowledgeable helping them choose appropriate movements, exercises, and activity.
With this being said, there is another side. Elite athletes and extreme performance are not exactly the best examples of healthy living. While there are clear benefits to remaining active, at the extremes there is some negative consequence as well. These feats of athleticism place a toll on the body as well. This was very clear to me after completing my first marathon. I was convinced by personal experience that there is another extreme. Another example is the shortened average lifespan of the NFL player.
To summarize:
- What happens as you age is partially (& significantly) your choice? (see images).
- There's a middle road between the couch and ultra-marathons. Maybe the focus should be on long term athletic participation.


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Creative Labs Vado HD 8GB is a thin and lightweight camcorder that small enough to fit your pocket easily. Just single button press and capture your happy time in 720p HD quality. Built-in software makes it simply to share your videos to online communities such as youtube or photobucket.
You can record and playback up to an hour for each charge. Creative Labs Vado HD 8GB comes with wide-angle lens, 2x digital zoom, 8GB of built-in storage capacity as the name stated.
Bundled in the box, USB extension cable, Silicon skin, Rechargeable battery and Vado Central software for simple video editing and sharing. HDMI and A/V cables is sold separately.iew Creative Labs Vado HD 8GB at Amazon for $89.99 + Free shipping(US) View Creative Labs Vado HD 8GB at Amazon for $129 + Free shipping(US)


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Wednesday March 14th: "Dangerous Gambles"
Wednesday March 14th: "Dangerous Gambles"
JH Sanderson has a second novel out this year, it's has everything including a rock band and espionage. The book even has an album that was entered in the Grammy's this year. Amy Coveno introduces us to the man behind "Dangerous Gambles."
Harold Sheffield of Bristol, served in the Pacific as one of the U.S. Marine Corps Raiders. Now 90 years old, he is writing a book about his experience. Adam Sexton sat down with him and brings us his remarkable story.
And on Fritz Wetherbee's NH: Boston Commandery Band March from Newton.
Hosting This Week From:
Woodstock Soapstone Company West Lebanon, NH 800-866-4344 www.woodstove.com


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Know more about this business than we do? Cool! Please submit any corrections or missing details you may have.Help us make it right
Be the first cleveland.com user to add photos or videos of City Grill
City Grill can be found at Detroit Ave 6416. The following is offered: Bars & Pubs. The entry is present with us since Sep 8, 2010 and was last updated on Nov 12, 2013. In Cleveland there are 275 other Bars & Pubs. An overview can be found here.
The City Grill is in the heart of Gordon Square Arts District, a vibrant and diverse lakeside neighborhood. This property is FOR SALE. Please contact Torry McJunkins Tutin - 216.469.5227 - firstname.lastname@example.com


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Every time I need my phone. It's dead. And I don't mean I'm waiting for a bus and I want to pass the time or I need to text a friend about catching up. I mean I've just moved to a brand new city and I am approximately 25 kilometres from where I need to be in about 2 minutes, or I need to call the person that is 25 kilometres away and I'm supposed to be meeting in 2 minutes, or I'm in a dark alleyway behind a nightclub wearing a skirt that's rather short and heels that are impractical to run away from potential killer but looked pretty good earlier in the night when I was taking mirror selfies in the safety of my room. Every imperative time I need my phone it may aswell be a loaf of bread because it is never any use to me. However the other day I had probably had the most embarrassing and potentially most dangerous experience that has eventuated from my phones persistent refusal to stay alive.
I called an Uber when my phone was on 1% and after being assigned one I proceeded to do what I always do when I call an Uber. Google the car. Because I don't even know what model my car is let alone Susan in her Hyundai. Yet alas, as I attempted to refresh my memory of an i20 my phone died which meant not only did I not know when my Uber driver would arrive, I was also unsure what kind of car I was looking for. SO, when a silver car pulled up literally right where I was standing I was terribly relieved and mentally noted to give Susan a 5 star rating when my trip was complete. I opened the car door, sat down and was about to ask how Susan's day was going when she screamed.
This was not Susan.
I was not in an Uber.
I was in a middle aged Asian woman's car who definitely was not about to drive me home.
I tried to explain the situation but she continued to scream so I went to open the door.
But she had locked it.
Then I started to scream partly because I couldn't get out partly because I realised that, had this woman not been more terrified of me then I was of her and she was in fact someone completely different perhaps I could've been in very hot water. But luckily a near death experience had been averted by seemingly picking the right car to jump into unannounced.
So after my non Uber driver had stopped screaming for me to get out of her car, I calmly announced to her that it was locked.
After she unlocked it, I did as she asked and got the fuck out of her car.
All this commotion occurred, purely and utterly because Apple has the audacity to create products that lose charge in less than three hours. I petition for better battery charge and for Uber to provide a picture or the colour of the car, because my phone is always dead, and unless I learn the models of cars or how to make my battery last, one day I will be too.
ART CREDIT: https://www.instagram.com/moniiqwa/
7/5/2016 09:46:15 pm
I love my HTC💖
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